Field of the Invention
Embodiments generally relate to online and web conferencing meetings and, more particularly, to sharing the contents of presentations with conference participants during the course of such meetings.
Description of the Related Art
The costs associated with travel have increased substantially over time. This trend, and the widespread availability of high-speed Internet access, has led many institutions to move their meetings, conferences and video presentations online. A typical use case for web-based tools such as Adobe® Connect™ from ADOBE Systems Incorporated involves a presentation wherein one or more people (referred to herein as “hosts”) organize an online interaction, and one or more people present a presentation containing content to a number of interested people (referred to herein as “invited participants” or, simply, “participants”). The online interaction may be a meeting, collaboration, webinar, pre-recorded video, or any other form of multiparty interaction on the web. As used herein, the term “online meeting” is meant to signify any type of multi-party interaction with content delivered over the web whether “live” or generated ahead of time (e.g., a pre-recorded video).
A presenter in a web conference has several options when it comes to the manner in which viewable content is distributed to participants during an online meeting. The most efficient and bandwidth-efficient technique is to share the document itself, as by uploading a document to a server prior to commencing the conference. In practice, however, the inventor has observed that most presenters tend toward sharing his or her entire desktop view with the other participants, which requires much more data to be exchanged between the server and meeting participants.
Therefore, a need exists for improved methods and apparatus for simplifying the process of document sharing in a web conferencing environment.